September 26, 2004 (thing)

I don't really know where else to node this stuff. It's a collection of passages and some lines I wrote myself that I never managed to weave into something workable, but that just struck me thematically when I opened up my scratchpad and saw it all there together. These sort of capture a certain frame of mind I was in back in about March of this year.

while she fell into despair because the past was becoming more and more faint. All she had left of her husband was his passport photo, the other photographs having remained in the confiscated Prague apartment" -Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 116.

"At the beginning of their time together, he had asked her (ten years older than she, he had already gotten some idea of human memory's wretchedness) to keep a diary that would record their life. She had resisted, declaring it would make light of their love. She loved him too much to admit that what she considered unforgettable could ever be forgotten. Finally, of course, she obeyed him, but with no enthusiasm. The notebooks showed it: there were many empty pages, and the entries were fragmentary" -Kundera, Ibid. 117.

"They got into a conversation. What intrigued Tamina were his questions. Not their content, but the simple fact that he was asking them. My God, it had been so long since anyone had asked her about anything! It seemed like an eternity! Only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love." -Kundera, Ibid. 223.

And again, there is the secret hope that someone will simply say "tell me something", leaving it open. A request from me for you. Any of you, all of you: impossible to give, impossible to take. "Tell me something": a request for openness. It signifies the pure desire to know the other; any fragment, all fragments of the other. The always becoming-beloved. Don't we all secretly wish that someone will say this to us? Does "I love you" seem quite as profound after it? "Tell me something": the utterance of love, freed.

"When Nietzsche said he wanted to be understood in fifty years, he could not have meant it in only the intellectual sense. That for which he lived and exalted himself demands that life, joy, and death be brought into play, and not the tired attention of the intellect. This must be stated simply and with an awareness of one's own involvement." -Georges Bataille, "Propositions", in Visions of Excess, 197.

"Universal existence, eternally unfinished and acephalic, a world like a bleeding wound, endlessly creating and destroying particular finite beings: it is this sense that true universality is the death of God." -Bataille, Ibid. 201.

"{Nietzsche's} masterful siege of the language permits him to transmit something uncodifiable: the notion of style as politics." -Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought" in The New Nietzsche, 143.

"To think the way one dies: without purpose, without power, without unity, and precisely, without 'the way'. " -Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 39.

"If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word 'authentic' -Blanchot, Ibid. 60.

"Bereft of certitude, he does not doubt: has hasn't that support." -Blanchot, Ibid. 12.

"Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, and this need still presupposes the total, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love also goes beyond the beloved. This is why through the face filters the obscure light coming from beyond the face, from what is not yet, from a future never future, more remote than the possible. " - Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 254-255.

"Love-Love forgives even the lover his lust." -Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science §62.

"That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil." - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §153.

"Resonance. All intense moods bring with them a resonance of related feelings and moods; they seem to stir up memory. Something in us remembers and becomes of similar states and their origin. Thus habitual, rapid associations of feelings and thoughts are formed, which, when they follow through with lightning speed upon one another, are eventually no longer felt as complexes, but rather as unities. In this sense, one speaks of moral feelings, religious feelings, as if they were all unities; in truth they are rivers with a hundred sources and tributaries. As is so often the case, the unity of the word does not guarantee the unity of the thing." -Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human §14.

"the night of the lovers is the other night, la nuit différent, hors de chair et de la nôtre; and likewise it is a space of fragments where dreams s'attendent, se dispersent sans se souffrir enchaînes. And so on without end." -Gerald L. Bruns, Blanchot 157-158.

"Note the phrase 'opening unknown spaces of freedom': imagine this as the task of poetry or of writing outside of language. Or of love."-Bruns, Ibid. 158.

Love is stated best without being articulated; it appears as an excess which moves around phrases and actions, something that resonates but which escapes all words. It can live in words but no words can capture its life. It is constant motion, even in a moment of perfect stillness. Always broken, always falling away and always being picked up again. Desire, necessity.

"Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable for him is to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach. Tamina lacked the infinitude of her love, I lacked Pap, and all of us are lacking in our work because in pursuit of perfection we go towrad the core of the matter but never quite get to it." -Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. 226.

"there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved" - Kundera, Ibid. 227.

"We were supposed to meet our parents in Duluth/We used the weather that day as an excuse/We just laughed and talked slow/While the gutters overflowed and our hearts did too." - Chamberlain, "That Was The Best", from the album The Moon My Saddle.

"How the time is never now and we know who we should love, but we're never certain how. I know you might roll your eyes at this, but Im so glad that you exist." -The Weakerthans, "The Reasons", from the album Reconstruction Site.